Look at them over on that island to the east, copying us here on the mainland with their inferior The Celebrity Traitors (BBC One, Wednesday), which is clearly ripped off from Traitors Ireland: A Nation Once Again (RTÉ Player). There’s something so much more special seeing traitorous behaviour executed in your own accent (and then having traitors executed by people with your own accent). The BBC offering only has one broguish individual (the talented actor Ruth Codd).
And whoever this Claudia Winkleman is, she’s no Siobhán McSweeney, who comes with a laid-back evil confidence that could only come from Cork. Winkleman is a bit more Cruella de Vil.
She certainly looks striking, loitering in a graveyard wearing a black poncho and with a mop of hair that resembles a poncho for the head, and heavy eyeliner that’s threatening to expand into panda cosplay or blackface. She looks like the creepy girl from The Ring at a job interview or Cousin Itt, from The Addams Family, after a makeover.
What I’m trying to say is that she looks amazing. I hope to see a whole phalanx of Winklemen come Halloween.
We already have Great House Revival. What we need now is Feck the Preservation Order, Let’s Knock It and Build an Office Block
The Celebrity Traitors is clearly ripped off from Traitors Ireland: A Nation Once Again
Today I will discuss House of Beamish. I think I remember the plot from history class, but we were all quite drunk
The Morning Show is just like real life. Who hasn’t slept with a tech billionaire?
Perfidious Albion has, in fairness, assembled quite a crop of celebrities for this production. Time was that celebrity reality television featured the wider television ecosystem’s offcuts. Celebrity had degraded so much. It wasn’t unusual to see someone who had once been in a minor boy band, in another reality-TV show or simply quite popular at your school.
All of these people had desperate looks on their faces and scoffed their free grub and wine as if they hadn’t eaten in months. “Don’t send me back!” they would cry on being evicted. “Don’t send me back with all the normals! Let me stay here with you in television paradise forever!”
The Celebrity Traitors, on the other hand, features people who are never off the telly. They include the aquatic hunk Tom Daley, the giggly chatterbox Alan Carr and the ironically well-coiffured sports presenter Clare Balding. And they all completely inhabit the lunatic spirit of the thing.
“I don’t know what beasts lie within me,” says Stephen Fry, the smartest man in England. If there are beasts inside him, I imagine they’re Sylvanian families or Beatrix Potter characters or Flipper the dolphin.
“Maybe I have a dark side,” says Carr, who I suspect doesn’t even have a dark shirt.
“I’m going to fight to the death,” says Tom Daley, clearly mistaking this show for the upcoming Prime Video production MrBeast’s Celebrity Fight to the Death.
They arrive in a convoy of SUVs – this is, if you recall your David Attenborough, how wild celebrities migrate – and are immediately taken to a cemetery where Winklemen instructs them to scrabble in the dirt before gravestones freshly engraved with their names. They are searching for golden shields that grant immunity from murder/eviction.
It’s quite an image. I am fully convinced that someday soon Winkleman will turn up and tell me to dig my own grave and it won’t be a reality show.
When they finally arrive at the castle the celebs lounge about among the gargoyles and antiques while Fry heads straight to the bookshelf, eager to thumb through the books and hide his greatest secret: he cannot read.
Before long the 19 celebrities are assembled at a big round table and blindfolded – whereupon, if I was a celebrity, I’d assume there were going to be some sexy Eyes Wide Shut – style shenanigans. Sure, isn’t that what they’re all used to, after all?
Instead Winkleman rounds the table in a sinister fashion, selecting three “traitors” with a tap on the shoulder. Their job is to secretly dispatch the remaining “faithfuls” (who now include the aptly named singer Paloma Faith). The singer Cat Burns is chosen – and can’t keep a big happy traitorous smile off her face. Jonathan Ross is chosen and he instantly starts overthinking because he is a veteran of show business, which is, in many ways, already a den of traitors. Carr is also chosen and he is my favourite traitor, because, as he says himself, “I’ve a sweating problem, and I can’t keep a secret.”
It’s a hilarious choice. I keep expecting him to start each sentence with, “As a traitor ...”
After this Winkleman transports all of the celebrities to a lonely mountain road where they must heave a big wooden Trojan horse through four gates that can only be opened by solving puzzles. It’s unclear why she needs this done, but they don’t question it. This adds £15,000 to the prize pot that the winner will be able to donate to a charity of their choice.
The first question at the first gate is about the number of people killed in Romeo and Juliet. Everyone turns to Fry for answers, unaware of his terrible secret. (He hates books and learning of all kinds.)
At one point Charlotte Church – a singer, not an actual church – nobly gives up her protective shield to open a gate. This makes everyone suspicious.
Everything anyone does on Traitors makes people suspicious, because there is no actual way to play this game well, as psychologically healthy people aren’t good at witch-finding, nor should they be.
At the end Daley sets the horse on fire, which is sad for any Greeks still inside but seems to please Winkleman.
Later the trio of traitors are informed that they must kill a faithful by rubbing their fingers on a black lily and touching the murder victim on the face. This feels unnecessarily complicated when hammers and knives and guns exist.
Burns and Ross decide that Carr is the least suspicious person to engage in a bit of face touching, and they give him the task. Carr looks as if the stress might actually kill him. This is, in fairness, excellent TV. Although two-faced betrayal has a lot more warmth when it comes wrapped in an Irish accent, don’t you think? Who doesn’t want to be betrayed by their own, after all?
Speaking of betrayal, the animated series Marvel Zombies (Disney+) is about an alternative universe in which superheroes are overrun by bitey zombies, many of whom are former superpeople themselves. It feels like an unnecessarily on-the-nose metaphor for the trajectory of the entire Marvel franchise, which has over the past few years been reduced to a living death of self-aware jokes, charismatic actors and meaningless CGI spectacle.
Marvel Zombies isn’t the worst culprit, but I feel that within its endless cameos and callbacks to other properties it’s basically a cry for help from every human involved. “Why don’t we all exert all these resources into stories about real people and their lives?” they cry. Somewhere in Marvel HQ they’re dispatching the crack assassin Alan Carr to the writers’ room with the dust of a poisonous black lily on his hands.
